Reading
Today’s reading are words of O. Eugene Pickett, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Because we are individualist, we tend to distrust our institutions. Because we are Congregationalists, we tend to support associative action reluctantly. Because we are nonconformists, we tend to resist the lessons of the past, many of which warn us of mistaking rhetoric for substance and embracing an arrogant, if not excessive, individualism which can be destructive of the common good.
Unitarian Universalism is an idea, a faith, an international movement, an historical institution whose expression is more than congregational, but other than hierarchical. The key word is associative. We work and worship in association with one another, which is to say, in partnership with one another. The Association represents our best effort to walk together in trust and respect with all who value a free but organized religion.” (p. 195).
The longer I am a part of this movement, the more convinced I become that the values and ideals of liberal religion can be effective only if they have a solid institutional base, and that means strong congregations and a strong Association. I know that we as a religious movement have traditionally been suspicious of a strong Association. We have been fearful that strength would mean power, rigidity, and control. But I am convinced that our Association can be both strong and flexible, an institution of which we can be critical while still being committed to it.
Those years as president made me deeply aware of how much we need one another. It is only as we recognize our mutuality, honor our diversity, and reconcile our differences with respectful honesty that we can build a strong and vital religious community. Being part of and nurturing such a religious community is what ministry is to me….
I have found that I need you in order to be me, that we need them in order to be us, that only together do we have a future. Could we but accept and act on this simple but basic insight, prejudices would be undermined, injustices denounced, and exploitation of nature and people condemned. The world would become ours and all women and men us.
Sermon
A week ago Saturday I was in Columbus, Ohio, leading a workshop on membership growth. Ministers and lay leaders from more than twenty Unitarian Universalist congregations were there. The weekend before that I was in Los Angeles. There I did pretty much the same thing. I gave a keynote address and then led a workshop for churches from the Los Angeles area. Incidentally, at both of these workshops I ran into former active members of our congregation. I saw Jan Dunn and John Wahl in Los Angeles and Ben Blee and Gretchen Curtis in Columbus. It was great to see familiar folks in strange places. Like so many Unitarian Universalists, when they moved away they immediately looked for a UU congregtion to join.
In a couple of weeks I will fly to New Jersey to do a Friday evening and Saturday workshop with the minister, board of trustees, committee on ministry and other lay leaders of one congregation. Just as I did last week, I will fly back Saturday night and be here in the pulpit the following day. And this is just in September and October. I was joking around the office last week that I should fire the idiot who arranged this crazy schedule (that would be me). And this is just the most recent stuff. Last June I was asked to do a workshop for ministers as part of Ministry Days just before General Assembly in Portland. And last spring I gave the keynote at the annual meeting of the Pacific Central District. Next month I am one of a dozen UU ministers who have been invited to a conference on growing our movement.
What in the world is going on? Why is your aging, grey, chronically befuddled, increasingly portly minister being asked to go all over the place and rant (sadly, I do rant) about what I think we need to do to grow our little movement?
It’s your fault. In the last decade we have been one of the half dozen or so fastest growing churches in our movement. Amazingly, we are now the twelfth largest church in our Association. Growing churches get a lot of attention. The last couple of General Assemblies have been pretty wild if you are from JUC. The vast majority of leaders in our movement have now heard of Jefferson Unitarian Church.
Our name recognition really took off a year and a half ago. Someone at our Boston headquarters had the excellent idea of creating what they called “UU University” just before General Assembly. The idea was to invite 400 church leaders to a two day conference that focused on issues our congregational leaders had said they wanted help with: finances, church governance, and membership development. Each of these three areas was to have a track of three consecutive workshops. We were asked if JUC would lead the track on membership development.
We agreed. Then, as spring rolled around, we actually had to plan it. Annie Hedberg, our membership coordinator, and Dea Brayden, this morning’s chalice lighter and at that time our volunteer coordinator, and I began to talk about what we would do. We were convinced that nothing JUC had done to grow was magic or very complicated. Most every church can grow if it does a better job of welcoming people who come seeking a spiritual home, if it works to help visitors become new members, and then helps people get connected in groups and activities. Then we hit on the idea that rather than tell people about some of the things we had tried, that we should show them. I requested and received some funds to have Steve and Chris Sealy produce a training video. This video has since been sent to every church in the Association. Lots of people have watched it.
Although you don’t know it, many of you are on this video. You’re famous! People from our church who go to GA tell me they get stopped in hallways and spoken to in elevators. Our little church here in Golden is known all over the Association. That, I guess, is the good news. The not so good news is that our Association isn’t very big. And it isn’t nearly as big as I think it ought to be or as it needs to be to fulfill its mission.
Today is Association Sunday. All over north America, in hundreds of pulpits, ministers are speaking about our religious movement and what we are trying to become. Today we are trying to raise special funds to help grow our movement.
Now, from day to day and week to week the vast majority of us don’t think about the Association. We are concerned about JUC, our congregation. This is as it should be. We exist in order to be a spiritual home and to work together to help heal some of the world’s wounds. No one joins a denomination. We join a congregation. We commit ourselves to making this a place where we can deepen our lives, care for each other and raise our children to be accepting and compassionate.
Yet we are not alone. We are one of a thousand progressive, tolerant, idealistic religious homes that call themselves Unitarian Universalist. What is this Association of ours? Where did it come from? How is it doing? Who are these brothers and sisters in faith across America and beyond? What kind of relationship should we have with them? What does our future look like?
In order to understand who we are and where we are, first we need to take a quick peek at where we have been. We need to see today in context of history.
So, let’s go back, oh, say a couple of thousand years! Calm down. This will only take a few minutes. Let’s go back to the little religious movement that sprang up after the execution of Jesus. Followers of Jesus began spreading the gospel among Jews and beyond. As Christianity spread it became very diverse. Some people thought Jesus was a god. Others did not. Gnostic Christians, for example, did not take the stories of miracles and resurrection literally. They saw the stories as symbolic. Some Christians thought of Jesus as a prophet sent from God, but not part of God. There was no common scripture. The first books of the New Testament were not written until generations after the death of Jesus; the collection we call the Bible was centuries away from being compiled.
It was not unlike today. There were people who called themselves Christians who believed a wide variety of things. And, like today, some of them argued with each other at great length.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted and decided to make Christianity the official religion of the empire, everything changed. Like emperors everywhere, he wanted order and control. In the year 325 Constantine brought together bishops from all over the empire. He brought them to the city of Nicea in Asia Minor. Their task was to hammer out their differences and come up with a statement that would define Christianity. They debated for weeks. Finally Constantine took sides and that ended that. What resulted was the Nicene Creed. Perhaps some of you former Catholics or Lutherans can still recite it. It begins, “We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made…” It goes on to recite a list of things that Christians are supposed to believe.
The creed became a kind of loyalty oath. Heretics, those who did not agree, were persecuted and killed. Their writings were destroyed. A number of recent archeological finds have discovered writings of the losers, writings that were buried and hidden so that they would not be burned. No one knows how much was lost forever.
And so it was for more than a thousand years. The church that Constantine created defined what it was to be a Christian. It still has its headquarters in Rome. Then the printing press got invented. The Bible was translated into the vernacular and circulated everywhere. A lot more people read it and, just like today, they came to very different conclusions.
Martin Luther and other heretics and reformers challenged the authority of the Pope and the church. What they said, and this is central, is that there is a higher authority than the teachings of the church. That higher authority is scripture. This, of course, was the Prostestant Reformation. Suddenly there were all kinds of Christians with all kinds of different beliefs about doctrines like the Trinity and infant baptism and all sorts of things.
One small group believed that the scriptures did not support the doctrine of the Trinity. These folks were dubbed Unitarians. A group of them settled in Transylvania, in what is now Romania. They were always a small part of the Reformation, but their ideas were discussed all over Europe.
Another small group came to believe that if God is love and portrayed in Christian scripture as a loving father, it didn’t seem right that a loving father would condemn the vast majority of his children to eternal damnation. These people believed that eventually everyone would enter paradise, or that salvation was universal. They became known as Universalists.
Well, these ideas came over to America. America was fertile ground for all kinds of heretical ideas.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, a number of the leading ministers in New England, many of them educated at Harvard Divinity School, came to accept the criticisms of the doctrine of the Trinity. At first they did so quietly (just as today lots of ministers in orthodox churches don’t really accept the official teachings). But, like ministers everywhere, they could not keep their opinions to themselves. Guess what. A big argument ensued between the traditional Trinitarians and the heretical Unitarians in New England.
Eventually, in 1825, the ministers who accepted a unitarian theology formed an association. This became the American Unitarian Association. It was originally a group of ministers, not a group of churches.
Meanwhile, a small number of Universalist preachers began spreading their theology of hope and salvation for everyone. However, they were not already part of established and rather elite New England churches. They were itinerants. They went around founding little Universalist churches everywhere.
The great leader of the early Unitarians was William Ellery Channing. The great leader of the early Universalists was Hosea Ballou. They lived a short walk from each other in Boston for many years. There were, of course, aware of each other. There is no record that they ever met.
The truth is that the differences between the Unitarians and the Universalists were more sociological than theological. This was especially true as time went on. The Unitarians were urban, educated and professional. The Universalists were more rural, less educated and farmers or working class.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who came to study American society and who wrote the classic two volume work, Democracy in America, had this to say about Unitarians: “On the confines of Protestantism is a sect which is Christian only in name, the Unitarians. ... They are pure Deists. They speak of the Bible because they do not wish to shock public opinion, still entirely Christian, too deeply. ... It's evident that the Protestants whose minds are cold and logical, the argumentative classes, the men whose habits are intellectual and scientific, are grasping the occasion to embrace an entirely philosophic faith…"
The two movements actually grew less and less different as time wore on. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was talk of their merging. These things happen at the speed of church, however. A hundred years later, in 1961, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church in America finally merged to become the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregation, the UUA.
There it is: two thousand years of church history leading up to us. And here we are. Today our Association has just over 1000 congregations. The total adult membership is just a bit more than 150,000. This is a bit misleading. If you ask Americans what religion they are, around 600,000 say “Unitarian Universalist.” Go figure. A lot of people think of themselves as UUs, but they don’t belong to any church.
We have about the same number of members today that we had in 1961. In the 1970s membership went down. For the last 30 years or so it has increased very slowly, at the rate of about one percent per year. I am fond of pointing out that this comes to about one additional member per congregation per year.
This drives me absolutely nuts. It drives me nuts because I see, week after week, how many people there are who want honest spiritual community, who want to be part of something that offers depth, meaning, real friendship, and a chance to serve. I see so many people who don’t want to pretend to believe things they don’t.
I don’t want our movement to grow in order to grow. I want us to serve more people and to make a difference in the world. I want us to be open and genuinely welcoming to the thousands of people just like us who come into our churches every week seeking a religious community.
Sadly, as a movement we have not done a good job. Happily, as a movement we are trying harder and harder to do better. We have a national media campaign that just began with ads in Time magazine. We are looking to raise money in order to fund good ideas in local congregations. The theme of this new effort, appropriately enough, is “Now is the Time.” One of the reasons I am willing to fly all over the place to give keynote addresses and lead workshops is that I want to support this renewed interest in sharing our faith and opening our congregations.
You and I have a position of leadership in our movement. We never really intended it or planned it. Our role goes far beyond me going around and doing my rant.
Keith Arnold is the new president of the UU Musicians Network. This work is already taking him away to national meetings several times a year. We are hosting a district wide conference on pastoral care next month. Our pastoral care committee has done an outstanding job preparing for this. Our leadership goes beyond the UUA, too. Nathan Woodliff Stanley is now chairing the public policy commission of the Colorado Interfaith Alliance and serves on its board of directors. Our staff, especially Annie Hedberg, our membership coordinator, Sue Parilla, our volunteer coordinator, and Cyndee Dries, our administrator, end up doing a lot of informal consulting with other congregations who call with questions.
Look, you and I know that we are not perfect. We don’t know it all and don’t pretend to. However, today we are leaders in our Association and we are likely to remain so for a while. We need to think about how we want to play this role, and how much time we wish to devote to it.
Today’s special offering is in order to fund new initiatives: a media campaign designed to make us more visible, an effort to extend diversity in our ministry, and funds that will be used for grants to individual congregations. I am especially excited about this last initiative: grants to individual congregations to help them grow.
Some of you know that I have been a critic of our movement’s efforts to promote growth. A few close colleagues have teased me for participating in this Association Sunday.
I still sometimes disagree with what our headquarters does. However, I am participating because I don’t need to agree with everything in order to support our overall effort. We need to hang together as a movement. We need to do a better job of responding the needs of what I call the spiritually hungry and the religiously homeless. I believe it is a moral imperative.
I urge you to join me in making a special gift today. Indeed, now is our time.
Let us make it so.
Amen.